Thesis: The Mapping Project… tentative title
Statement: I want to reconcile geography with the digital age (which is thought to make geography and place unimportant) by:
Cultivating a sense of place and space
Making people use their hands to define space and use their feet to explore space
Encourage the psycho-geographical drift
The Project: Allow people to create personal maps of their explorations in real space and tie them to explorations of cyber-space.
Methodology:
1. Contact strangers through Craigslist and other online communities
2. Ask them to email me their personal address
3. Send a postal package with a blank piece of paper, a disposable camera, and a writing tool, and a set of instructions
a. The piece of paper will have a start point (their address) and an end point which is about a 30 minute walk from their home
b. I might lightly trace the street grids in order to provide some context
4. Ask them to walk in a psycho-geographical sense from the start to the end and document it using the camera
5. Ask them to send it back to me
6. When I receive the package I will develop the images and scan the hand-drawn map in order to create an online archive of these journeys
7. I will collect all of the artifacts (the map, the camera, the writing tool, the package, etc) in order to create a physical archive
Important considerations:
Seeing the hand of the participant as well as my own
Making the instructions specific enough to define the experience but not to constrain the experience
How do I make people engage with the entire process? i.e. what if they don’t send the package back?
Maybe pictures are not the best way to document the experience so what are other ways? Collecting artifacts from the journey? Text?
What is the true journey? i.e. should I also visualize the journey from the internet to the postal to the walk and back?
How do I make the web component reflect the process?
Other Iterations:
Should I do something like Andrew Schnieders acting project? i.e. assign routes and let people chose them… place interventions along the way? Have people’s routes cross? Follow people while they walk?
